Busy weekend. The good kind of busy. After weeks of searching, we might just have found our house.

Two people with serious “me time” needs and too many clothes cannot long survive in a 1,600 square foot townhouse — no matter how good the closet space is. Not if they don’t want to hurt each other.

(Yeah, Jesse, I’ll probably take the time to explain just why you were wrong. Although I’ll admit right up front that of all bloggers, I have no excuse for complaining when someone else is being snide.)

Miller wants to divide AOL’s 25 million U.S. subscribers into six groups and serve them news, advertising and other features tailored to their interests.

The segmentation strategy is consistent with the renewed focus on subscribers that is the mantra of AOL Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis, who says the company has lost its way in recent years by letting big advertising deals drive its content, rather than catering to the interests of its members. AOL subscribers pay $23.90 a month for dial-up access to the Internet and to receive exclusive content.

I used AOL as my backup ISP for several years. Under the “BYON” (Bring Your Own Network) plan, I paid ten bucks a month to keep in touch with my many friends who used AOL. AOL jacked up the price, and so I left.

Their original content wasn’t worth fifteen dollars, since it mostly consisted of grainy RealPlayer movie trailer videos — and RealPlayer had a nasty habit of crashing my system, reassigning my default players (even when told not to) and leaving a string of ugly pop-ups every time I tried to close it.

And that’s to say nothing of AOL’s rudimentary email system (essentially unchanged since the early ’90s or earlier), annoying advertising, and endless shilling for Time-Warner stuff. “Synergy” is business-speak for “interminable boosterism.”

Now they want to make it more like the wreck that is cable television? Spare us, please.

I heard someone on the news yesterday — Rumsfeld? — try to cool worries about the Pentagon’s planned database. You know, the one that will record every single credit card purchase made by every single person in America.

Paraphrasing, he said that our fears are overblown. No one worries that banks and grocery stores and insurance companies already collect all this data.

Actually, some of us do worry about those little details. But what is left unsaid, is that banks and insurance companies don’t have guns or jails. The government does.

Oppose intrusions into privacy as vociferously as you would if it had been proposed by the Clinton administration.

Oppose intrusions upon the Bill of Rights more consistently in Congress.

Nominate more libertarian-conservative judges like Clarence Thomas to the courts who care about protecting individual liberty, not just traditionalist-conservative judges like Robert Bork who care most about the “liberty” of the majority to enshrine its preferences into law.

Oh, to be sure, there’ve been some useful bits of intelligence co-operation, and London and Washington have frozen the bank accounts of the dodgier Canadian charities. Two weeks ago, President Bush scored remarkable double victories over Tom Daschle’s Senate Democrats and the French Security Council veto. But Senator Daschle and the French are not the enemy; they’re just speed bumps on the way to the enemy, and both ought to have been receding into the distance in the rear-view mirror a long time ago. Instead, it’s the war that keeps getting deferred, to the point where it’s beginning to look like the Bush version of the Soviets’ endlessly rolled-over Five Year Plans.

Okay, I’m not that worried. Not yet, anyway. But the troublesome question is, where are the troops? I figured by this point, we’d have three divisions of armor, mechanized infantry, and Marines in Kuwait. The 101st, I figured, would be poised at Incirlik. Instead, we have reports that a mere 8,000 troops are in Kuwait — and most of the increase (from the usual 4,000) is in headquarters and support, not in combat forces. If we need to be ready to go shortly after December 8 and these numbers are true, then we simply can’t be ready in time.

If the deadline slips, Saddam and his terror cronies will be emboldened, what little international support we have will erode, and the period of good fighting weather will be over.

It’s true that we have much equipment pre-positioned around the Middle East. It’s also true that we won’t need nearly as large a force. But neither fact changes the third fact that inspections minus the threat of immediate reatliation make war more likely, not less, and also puts some doubt into the outcome.

So I ask: Where are the soldiers, sailors, and airmen to win this war?

And I ask another question: Is Bush II making the same mistake as Bush I, hoping Saddam will be killed in an uprising?

The White House last night began to build its case that Saddam Hussein was already defying the United Nations.

It said Iraq’s repeated attempts to fire on American and British aircraft in the no-fly zones amounted to a “material breach” of the latest Security Council resolution.

I think we all know by now what “material breach” means. To the US — you know, the guys with all the tanks and planes and stuff, ie, the people who count — it means war.

What I found most interesting this weekend, albeit in an obvious way, is how the new UN resolution is being viewed in the White House versus UN Sec-Gen Kofi Annan. Annan was on the news Friday or Saturday, explaining how he hoped, for the sake of peace of course, that the inspections were “thorough” and “complete” and “given a chance to work.”

In other words, Annan sees the new inspections regime as a way to forestall Iraq’s disarmament and prevent any regime change. His language is that of further delay and obfuscation.

In the White House (notice I didn’t say, “in Washington”), the resolution is little more than a nifty way of keeping the proponents of delay and obfuscation off out backs while we move men and material to the Middle East, and rebuild our supply of JDAMs and cruise missiles.

December 8 is, as others have noted, the key date. The White House will build its case over the next three weeks, building up to the crescendo of dropping bombs.

The whole process will feel tedious to those of us who know this war — however undesirable — is both necessary and just. The diplomacy will seem pointless at best, and a needless opportunity given to our political foes to hector and namecall and cloud the issue.

But the legal issues were settled on Friday. The important issues will be settled by force of arms, sometime after 12-8-2002.